The Caryatids (30 page)

"Oh, what astronaut crap you're talking now! How many rich and fa-mous scientists do you know? Did you ever
see
one lousy scientist get his own way in the real world? They're all hopeless eggheads full of make-believe theories!"

George drew a breath—she could hear him puffing in the busy cores of her new eardrums. "Sonja, please. When you were out there in the field — crusading to save civilization, or whatever — I cared about that, I helped you! You remember how may times I helped you go save your fa-vorite Chinese civilization? But now they're trying to kill you right there in their own spaceport! What kind of 'civilization'

is that to save?"

"This is China. Their system works differently."

"Look, I manage global logistics, so I learn something new every day," George boasted. "I can traffic in people like you! I'll
export
you from China. I'll export you right here to Vienna! When Inke heard that you were hurt again, she cried!"

Finally, Sonja was touched. Inke Zweig. Good old Inke. She had once spent a family Christmas together with Inke, when George, thank-fully, wasn't around.

First, Inke took her to Mass, insisting that she kneel and pray. Then Inke took her home, and Inke got very drunk on dainty, reeking, Ger-man herbal liqueurs. Then Inke, sobbingly, told Sonja all about her life. Inke vomited up her soul right at her kitchen table.

It was a boozy, sisterly, holiday heart-to-heart, all about Inke's house, and her kitchen, and her kids, and her favorite cabbage and sausage recipes, and the will of God, and her husband, and Inke's grinding, life-blighting fear of her hostile and terrible world.

Inke was intelligent—she was perceptive enough to know that the world "vas in lethal danger —but Inke was too timid to do anything useful.

So, Inke had married, instead. Inke had forfeited every aspect of human agency to the man in her life. Inke had hidden herself in her thick fog of housework and piety, where she could cook, pray, and have babies.

And this strategy even
made sense
for the woman, this self-abnegation was Inke's version of a heroic act. Inke Zweig was a sweet and tender and vulnerable creature. Inke loved her kids dearly. Inke's kids were even great kids, because they didn't know one single useful thing about reality. They thought their mom and dad were terrific and all-knowing and proud and prosperous.

Her kids even loved their aunt Sonja, for no particular reason that Sonja understood. They gave their aunt Sonja fancy Christmas presents from prestigious Viennese stores.

"Sonja, you are family: Inke always says that. Inke would love to look after you," George promised.

"You wouldn't have to see me at all! I'm on the road most days. You could have your own private wing of the man-sion! Or—if my global business keeps booming—you can have your own apartment building!"

"Vienna is pretty," she told him. "I think you made a good choice, working there."

"Sonja, you won't survive. To get killed—like our others were killed? —that was tragic. But to
want
to be killed, like
you
so obviously want to be killed? That is sheer foolishness!"

"Djordje, suppose that I go to Europe, and I lose my temper there, and I kill
you?
"

"Oh, you would never do that!" George lied. "Any more than I would ever kill
you.
" Sonja thought about his proposal for all of fifteen seconds. No, his sad, meager, bourgeois little notions wouldn't do.

"George," she told him sweetly, "I want you to help me leave Ji-uquan."

"Great, great! Excellent news! Now you're talking sense! You name the date!"

"I want you to find some Provincial Reconstruction Team—Acquis, Dispensation, whoever—located in central Asia. Well outside the borders of China, out in the desert, where the wild people are. Get them to put in a formal request for my aid and expertise. It's always much easier for me to travel outside China when the state has the formal documents."

"All right, fine, one small moment here," said George, "let me use my correlation engine! With this amazing new business tool, I can change your life from right here in my chair! My new network engine is Californian!In ten years the whole Earth will have a new economy!"

Sonja's keen ears heard George busily tapping at keys." 'Scythia'?" George said, almost at once. "Would

'Scythia' do for you? Scythia is a poststate disaster region in the middle of Asia. You could go anywhere in Asia and claim you were going to 'Scythia.' "

"I know about Scythia. I also need special travel gear, George. Some private-militia, hunter-killer, Scorpion-tag-team, covert-penetration gear." Sonja paused. "That's not for me. It's a wedding gift." This demand made George unhappy. "You know that I stopped facil-itating that market. Those years were the bad old years. Those years are behind both of us now."

"I'm sure you didn't forget how to globally traffic in arms."

"Sonja, don't say that sort of thing about me. That hurts my feelings. I am paying to do this for you, and I will not pay to see you get killed in a desert. I want you to
not
get killed, that is my program. Forget rushing into the wild desert with many big guns. That is not practical."

"I have to leave here. I'm attracting trouble. So I have two choices: space, or the desert. We have no manned launches scheduled in Ji-uquan. Oh, there is one third choice: if I'm willing to go to Antarctica. The ice desert.In Antarctica, I would be wearing a giant nuclear-powered robot suit and building glaciers with my fists."

George was interested. "Is it so bad for you in Jiuquan that the state would send you into exile in Antarctica? That's the sister project to that giant Chinese project in the Himalayas."

"How did you know all that?"

"Never mind."

"Antarctica is very like Mars. The Chinese state would reassign me to build fresh ice at the South Pole. There I would be out of reach of any flying bombs. Except for the state's own flying bombs."

"That's a strange tangle," George said thoughtfully. "Your state's plan for preserving your welfare is very ingenious and very not-human. An autonomous bureaucracy makes peculiar, lateral moves."

"The Chinese state loves me," Sonja told him. "I've always had a spe-cial rapport for ubiquitous systems."

"You don't want to go to Antarctica?"

"No," she shouted, "I don't want to hide from the bandits in a nuclear robot suit! That useless strategy is for
cowards!
You find the bastards, you triangulate their position, and you
fry
them! Then you seize their com-puters and phones and arrest everyone that they know. That's my war."

"Are you
required
to say that sort of thing, Sonja?"

"I don't 'say' that. I
do
that."

"Let me do another search on my beloved new engine," said George. "It never fails to hit on correlations of major interest."

George tapped away. He was such a soft European idiot. George had no grasp of harsh reality; he was useful but weak. The state needed strong people, like herself and the Badaulet. It needed human agents willing to venture beyond its limits.

Being a nation, the Chinese state had many national limits. It held power: because it commanded the rivers and the national canals. The state commanded anything to do with the nation's precious water re-sources: the distilleries, dams, the reservoirs, the plumbing, the sewers, the water-treatment recyclers .

. . the streets, the traffic . . . the national power grid, the urban video system, the telecoms, the archives and every Chinese satellite, of course . . .

George was postnational, global . . . but his beloved "global busi-ness" had been selling human flesh in public, when, during China's worst crisis, the Chinese state never grieved and it never faltered and it never gave up restoring and extending control.

The state controlled public health. The state destroyed disease. The Chinese state destroyed disease with the ruthless and dispassionate effi-ciency of a computer defeating human grandmasters at chess. Sonja hated and feared disease more than any other horror she had witnessed. Any enemy of disease was Sonja's friend. She was grateful for what the state had done.

"Scythian ice princess," George announced.

"What did you just call me?"

"This is a beautiful correlation here. Only a very speedy and glorious network could have linked these phenomena. Listen to this: I am look-ing at a Scythian ice princess. She's not pretty, because she is a dead Bronze Age woman. She was buried in central Asia in a tomb of per-mafrost. But: That permafrost was melting quickly. So the Chinese used their Martian ice probes to search for frozen tombs in the Asian desert . . . and the Chinese found this Scythian princess, this tattooed mummy that I am seeing at this moment, and they dug her up with a se-cret strike-and-retrieval team. That ancient corpse is under scientific study—there in Jiuquan, in the same hospital, with you! She is not one hundred meters away from you! Top
that,
eh?"

George chuckled gleefully. "She is two floors away from you, locked inside a medical refrigerator!

Correlation engines are
amazing technol-ogy,
aren't they? I have used business-to-business networks all my life, but this is
supernatural.
Can you imagine how much data the net has sorted, to find that out so quickly? And I possess that speed and power, on my desk, here in Vienna! The world will be transformed!"

Sonja ran her fingers gently over the seething, blistering, restorative exfection on her forearms. "George, why should I care about your 'Scythian ice princess'?"

"You don't care—and I don't care that you don't care, because
I care.
This dead Scythian woman has
human gut flora that dates back before antibiotic pollution.
She has her original human commensal microor-ganisms! Does that sound familiar to you?"

Sonja was in Jiuquan, so of course microbes sounded familiar to her. "George, no one wants any
ancient, wild
microbes. Those microbes are
backward
and
feudal.
Those microbes are of academic interest only. You want Jiuquan's
fully advanced
internal gut microbes, created in the state's genetic-recombinatorial labs. Those microbes are state secrets, and very valuable."

"Oh no, I want those
good old-fashioned all-natural
microbes," George said firmly. "Just-don't scrape any nasty goo out of some Asian corpse. I want the genetic sequences of the microbes. Just the pure data. Could you supply that microbe data to me? Could you do that, Sonja?"

"Probably. I am a public health officer here. Yes, I could do that."

"Excellent!"

"If I get you those Scythian microbes—will you ship me what I need for my military operations, with no more trifling?"

"Yes."

??????????

SONJA METHODICALLY READIED HERSELFfor vengeance: to find out who to kill, why, and how. Vengeance was a rather more thor-ough, thoughtful, and comprehensive effort than it had once been for Sonja.

When Sonja had first arrived in China—fresh off the boat at the age of nineteen—she had known that she was heading for a cataclysm. She had desired that fate, she had sought that out: the bold desperado, with-out a homeland, joining a foreign legion.

She'd instantly fallen in with much bolder desperadoes. All the men Sonja had loved were keen-eyed, domineering, headstrong, fearless men. They were men at home in hell. However, their courage, while al-ways necessary and always in short supply, was not what was needed to make a cataclysm
stop.
On the contrary: Raw courage was superb at
provoking
cataclysms. Any gutsy teenager, boldly careless of his life, could empty his gun into some archduke and create colossal chaos. Stopping cataclysms required imposing order.

Sonja had come to understand the order as the hard part of the work. To end a war meant either restoring an old order, or invoking a new order. Neither work was easy. Order, unlike war, required unglamorous skills such as political savvy, business sense, and rugged logistics. Restoring order required a crisp, succinct articulation of the big pic-ture and why one's efforts mattered in that regard. It required a tre-mendous knowledge of details. It needed the patience to build a long-lasting, big-scale enterprise that would not collapse instantly from guerrilla attacks. And it needed a cold-blooded ability to make firm choices among disgusting alternatives.

George was a merchant and a fixer, never the kind of man she liked. Yet George, for all his countless demerits, had a definite rapport for ubiquitous systems. George had a positive genius for handling border delays, security compliances, fuel costs, detours on the planet's weather-shattered roads and bridges, documentation hurdles, no-fly zones and confiscatory carbon-footprint taxes, port congestion, cargo security, reg-ulations both in-state and offshore, liaisons with manufacturers, out-sized and overweight shipping modules . . . Boring things, dull things. Yet George could ship things to her, and that mattered. Bravery mattered much less. A brave woman could be "very brave" in a field hospital. She might hold the hand of a dying child while it coughed up blood. That moral act required a courage that left dents all over one's soul, while, in the meantime, any tedious holdup in the flow of medical supplies could kill off
entire populations,
not tender children killed tragically in their ones and twos, but masses killed statistically in their hundreds and thousands.

Privates and sergeants bragged about courage: digging foxholes and kicking in doors. Colonels and generals talked soberly about supply trains and indirect fire. Barbarism, disorder, chaos, and murder were the ground state of mankind, so foxholes and ambushes were in infinite supply. Public order was about leveraging the things that were in short supply: with sturdy supply trains and superior firepower. It had taken Sonja quite some time to comprehend all this, because, as a nineteen-year-old adventuress, she had been far too busy learning Chinese, sopping up a patchy medical training, and establishing her personality cult. But she had finally learned such things, well enough. She'd had teachers. The fortunes of war favored the bold, if the bold survived. Sonja was nothing if not bold. Eventually, an important apparatchik had de-scended from the murky heavens of Beijing's inner circles to manifest a personal interest in her glorious career.